Up From Facebook

 I'm a scientist. I use facts and evidence, not emotion, as guides to action. "No credible statistical evidence exists to show that permissive concealed carry laws reduce crime. Instead, the evidence suggests that laws that make it easier for more people to carry guns in public may actually increase the frequency of some types of violent crime, including gun homicides." This is true in America and in all the other industrialized nations on the planet. Don't fall for GOP or NRA (but I repeat myself) propaganda. It's the guns, peeps. https://giffords.org/blog/2020/10/the-good-guy-with-a-gun-myth/

 Looks like another GOP-dominated state legislature wants to eliminate tenure at state universities. This time, it's my grad school alma mater, UNC-Chapel Hill. Sad. If they succeed, it will mark a slippery slope to mediocrity. None of the top universities--none--have eliminated tenure. If tenure were an academic problem, universities like Harvard, Yale and Stanford would have eliminated it years ago, and applicants would still be lined up around the block because of the brand. But most universities lack the reputation and the endowment to compete without tenure. Everyone in academia knows that all the schools that lack tenure are academically mediocre. https://www.juancole.com/2023/04/education-faculty-opposing.html

For ten years as Associate Dean for Research, and for three years before that, I served on the executive committee of the medical school at Saint Louis University. From time to time, the question of conflict of interest came up, and the department chairs (all MDeities) were unanimous in asserting that they could set aside their parochial interests and vote in the larger interests of the university. That's not what I observed. So when the SCOTUS asserts that it can police its own ethics, I have to laugh out loud. They also regard themselves as deities. Feh. "All nine justices, in a rare step, on Tuesday released a joint statement reaffirming their voluntary adherence to a general code of conduct but rebutting proposals for independent oversight, mandatory compliance with ethics rules and greater transparency in cases of recusal. "The implication, though not expressly stated, is that the court unanimously rejects legislation proposed by Democrats seeking to impose on the ju...

Separation of church and state is healthy for churches as well as the state. When church and state become conflated is historically a cause of violence. "Christian nationalism, which contends that the U.S. is a fundamentally Christian nation and should be governed by right-wing Christian beliefs, has been on the rise in Republican politics. According to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution, more than half of Republicans support Christian nationalism." Real Christians deplore Christian nationalism as a heresy and a threat to Christianity. Christian nationalism is about power and money, not Jesus. https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirks-turning-point-usa-increasingly-leaning-right-wing-christian  

I have no interest in getting a tattoo, but I know plenty of people who have them. I'd read about metal particles, but didn't realize that it wasn't the inks but the needles that were responsible. Caveat emptor. “We tested around 50 ink samples without finding such metal particles and made sure that we hadn't contaminated the samples during sample preparation. Then we thought of testing the needle and that was our 'eureka' moment,” added Ines Schreiver, corresponding author and scientist at the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment. "A deeper analysis showed that green, blue, and red tattoo inks contain a white pigment called titanium dioxide, which can wear away at the needle. Black ink, however, doesn’t contain this pigment and the needle wears down less. "This discovery could help to explain why tattoos can occasionally cause allergic reactions in some people. As for the wider health implications of having a lymph node loaded with nanoparticles, tha...

The NYT has a theory that Fox possesses a gentility previously unmeasured, and that Tucker Carlson's behavior was something up with which even Fox would not put. "When considering just what could have been so bad, consider that Carlson repeatedly insulted Donald Trump (not great for a Fox audience) and repeatedly called Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and an unnamed Fox executive the c-word. So it’s got to be pretty bad. Offensive remarks about women were manageable. This wasn’t. The Times says it hasn’t seen the actual messages but seems to leave open the possibility that they were briefed on their gist. The key part of their summary is that the messages “showed [Carlson] making highly offensive and crude remarks that went beyond the inflammatory, often racist comments of his prime-time show and anything disclosed in the lead-up to the trial.” "This is tea leaf reading. Perhaps it’s nothing. But it seems notable to me that they seem to place particular focus on racist comment...

 So if you rang up a huge credit card bill and decided that, on reflection, you won't pay it because you realize your spending was out of control, do you think the credit card company would say "OK, we'll eat this, hope your spending weight-loss program works out?" LOL! Of course not. But that's the default that the GOP expects the Senate and the President to embrace. It looks like Biden learned from the Obama administration. We pay our bills. Spending discipline can be negotiated in the next budget. Payment of past obligations from House budgets is non-negotiable. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/live-blog/mccarthy-edges-closer-to-seizing-the-debt-ceiling-as-gops-prized-hostage

"For nearly two years beginning in 2015, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch sought a buyer for a 40-acre tract of property he co-owned in rural Granby, Colorado. "Nine days after he was confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, the then-circuit court judge got one: The chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s biggest law firms with a robust practice before the high court. Gorsuch owned the property with two other individuals." IOKIYAR https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/25/neil-gorsuch-colorado-property-sale-00093579

Other industrialized nations don't debate this. Democrats don't hold the nation hostage when they're in power in the House. This is just dangerous GOP theater. "And because this should be said every time the debt ceiling is mentioned, we really need to get rid of it. The time to argue about spending is when you buy stuff, not when the bills come due. Unless you're a deadbeat, you pay up if you've promised to, and you don't make your payment subject to random, changing demands. You said you'd pay. You pay." https://jabberwocking.com/whose-debt-ceiling-is-it-anyway/

So it looks like Bud Light has fired its VP of marketing. Look, I have no interest in drinking beer-flavored seltzer. AB isn't even a US company. And until the gender-insecure right got its panties in a twist, I had never heard of Dylan Mulvaney. I'll just let Kevin Drum have the last word on the manly man "beer" swilling drama queens: "The only thing Anheuser-Busch and its VP of marketing failed to anticipate was the sheer vile and malevolence that animates the conservative movement these days. Doing a promotion with a trans woman hurts no one and violates no conservative principles. Dylan Mulvaney is not a child. She doesn't want to compete on a women's track team. She has no ideological message. Her Instagram video was entirely lighthearted and free of political content. "She's just an adult who wants to be left free to live her life. But that alone was enough to enrage the conservative movement into sputtering incoherence. The rabid hate that...

 Voter suppression. Income inequality. Healthcare access. Mass shootings. Over-incarceration. It's easy to be depressed about the future of the US, and there is certainly much room for improvement. But is the US really in decline? That depends on how you measure it. The GOP is forever bleating about hyperinflation and taxes killing the economy. Let's look at the evidence: "In summary: The dollar remains the world's reserve currency and shows no signs of that turning around anytime soon. Our GDP is the largest among big countries and our growth rate is second highest. Our military spending is wildly higher than anyone in the world. Our population growth is among the highest among rich nations. We have the most highly and broadly educated workforce. And while we may or may not be losing influence in the global south, does it really matter either way except at the margins?" We can easily afford to do better. Which party offers hope to do better. Which one offers only...

I remember (or at least think I do) a time when the Republican party believed in government. I didn't agree with them, but was willing to believe they had a vision for how to govern. Then along came St. Ronnie, who proclaimed that government was the problem (even though he served eight years at the head of the executive branch). But ever since then, the GOP has increasingly abandoned any serious interest in governing. The apotheosis was the Trump administration, which wasn't government but a cult of personality. The Trump cult still has a stranglehold on the GOP. Apparently, there are some murmurs of frustration in Florida that Trump's mini-me is also more interested in self-promoting revenge drama than government. But can the Florida GOP cut the umbilical cord to DeSantis? Color me skeptical. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/florida-gop-fed-up-with-desantis-pre-2024-agenda-were-not-the-party-of-cancel-culture

"One thing that slowly changed over my lifetime is that knocking on a stranger's door has become increasingly taboo. Impolite, at least. It isn't that I remember a time of a non-stop parade of strangers knocking on the door, but it was a perfectly normal thing when it happened. Someone walking up the driveway wasn't threatening. Certainly pulling into a someone's drive to make a "u-turn" was standard practice. "Of course it's obscene that anyone is inspired to pull out a gun and start shooting over these things, but how did "someone at my door or in my driveway" start being seen as intrusive behavior at all? "I mean, people shouldn't be pulling out guns and shooting at every perceived threat, but how did these things start being seen as perceived threats?" https://www.eschatonblog.com/2023/04/what-is-happening.html  

The realtor who sold our house in St. Louis told us to paint all the walls a specific shade of gray. Why? It seems that home buyers prefer bland. I guess they don't have to worry about what goes with their furniture, rugs and wall art. Except for one wall and each of two bedrooms, the walls in our RI house were also pale gray, including a couple of rooms that have wood paneling. I don't know if that's how the previous owner liked it, or if they were repainted after he moved out. I won't argue taste with anyone, but I prefer color in my life. Eventually, we may repaint some of the walls here. Once we're done paying for all the repairs and for the landscaping. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/04/18/metro/interior-designer-world-has-turned-gray-what-finally-killed-color/?s_campaign=bostonglobe:push:web

Public health (clean water, sanitary sewers) has saved more lives than all biomedical interventions put together. The green revolution enabled human populations to expand beyond what were believed to be Malthusian limits. But the nutritional content of some foods can be improved, further preserving health and lives without the intermediation of heathcare professionals: "White rice is the staple food in many developing countries, yet it lacks several key micronutrients. As a result, one in three children under the age of five is thought to suffer from vitamin A deficiency (VAD), a condition that causes blindness and weakens the immune system. "According to the World Health Organization, up to 500,000 children lose their sight each year because of VAD, half of whom die within 12 months of going blind. "Back in 2000, a solution to this global tragedy appeared to have been found when cell biologists Peter Beyer and Ingo Potrykus published details of their creation: Golden Ri...

 I see where Gov. DeSantis signed a bill outlawing abortion after five weeks and is likely to sign a bill allowing an 8-4 vote for capital punishment. Sorry, but you can't call yourself pro-life if you favor the death penalty, the cold-blooded murder of an unarmed and helpless adult by the state. I'm glad to live in a state that does not allow the death penalty. Rhode Island was one of the earliest states in the United States to abolish capital punishment, having abolished it for all crimes in 1852.

"States with abortion bans may see an unappreciated consequence when it comes to their physician workforce: fewer medical students, especially those interested in obstetrics and gynecology, are choosing to do their residency training there. "This could mean a looming shortage of doctors practicing in those states, since some 55% of residency graduates end up practicing in the same state in which they trained." https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/features/104032?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2023-04-14&eun=g1700464d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Headlines%20Evening%202023-04-14&utm_term=NL_Daily_DHE_dual-gmail-definition

 I'm nothing if not a paragon of fairness. Arizona Republicans found a Republican behavior up with which they will not put. "State Rep. Liz Harris was expelled Wednesday from the Arizona House of Representatives for ethics violations resulting from inviting a conspiracy theorist to publicly testify before lawmakers earlier this year. "The resolution to expel the first-term Republican, elected in November, stated that she had brought “disrepute and embarrassment to the House of Representatives,” resulting in “disorderly behavior.” Forty-six Arizona representatives in the GOP-controlled House voted to remove her from her elected position, meeting a two-thirds threshold to expel lawmakers." https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/12/politics/arizona-house-republican-expelled-liz-harris/index.html

The big challenge to replacing natural gas and coal with solar (and wind) is the intermittency problem. Batteries may provide some help, but unless and until a technology revolution occurs, they won't be the whole answer. There is increasing interest and investment in thermal energy storage. "Most people know about lithium-ion battery (chemical) storage and pumped hydro (mechanical) storage. However, thermal energy storage is not well understood or recognised. This is partly due to perceived costs and engineering challenges. However, as concentrated solar thermal plants are built all over the world – 30 are being developed in China alone – the knowledge base is growing." https://www.juancole.com/2023/04/solar-thermal-through.html

You know that billionaire guy who has been lavishing "hospitality" on Clarence Thomas? "When Republican megadonor Harlan Crow isn’t lavishing Justice Clarence Thomas with free trips on his private plane and yacht (in possible violation of Supreme Court ethics rules), he lives a quiet life in Dallas among his historical collections. These collections include Hitler artifacts—two of his paintings of European cityscapes, a signed copy of Mein Kampf, and assorted Nazi memorabilia—plus a garden full of statues of the 20th century’s worst despots." Feh.

"The final additional point goes well beyond abortion. This action threatens to upend the entire system of pharmaceutical regulation in the United States for their short term end of restricting abortion. Federal judges get the new ability to sit in review of the scientific analysis behind drug approvals. That opens the door to all sorts of chaos and decisions from judges who have zero background to evaluate such questions." What stops him from blocking all vaccines? All birth control pills? This is Steve Bannon's wet dream. To create chaos and bring American government to its knees. Lenin is smiling. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-corrupted-federal-judiciary

"The last time there were about 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere was the Pliocene era, roughly 5-2 million years before the present. In the middle of that era, about 3 million years ago, temperatures were particularly high. Temperature fluctuated in the past because the earth went through periods of high volcano activity. Over millions of years, the eruptions could gradually increase the CO2 in the atmosphere. Then over millions of years, oceans, igneous rock and other carbon sinks would absorb it again. If the volcanoes settled down for a while, the CO2 levels fell. Again, this took hundreds of thousands or millions of years. "Humans are much more virulent than a few volcanoes. We have done to the earth’s atmosphere in 270 years what it used to take nature millions of years to do." Even if all anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gas stopped today, it would make no difference for the planetary plunge into the abyss of coastal flooding, widespread desertification and the ...

  I've seen a number of comments to the effect that what the TN House did in expelling two elected Black men is a violation of the 1st Amendment. No, it isn't. The 1st Amendment does not guarantee your right to hold an elective state office. The 1st Amendment prevents the government from depriving you of life, liberty or property on the basis of your speech. That's it. What the TN state leg did was contemptible, and it says a lot about the fragile nature of the GOP project that they felt silencing peaceable assembly and expression of grievances was necessary. But it wasn't unconstitutional. It was just wrong.

"In late June 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef. ""If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. Fortunately for him, that wasn’t necessary: He was on vacation with real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too. For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, ...

Well, the US was a divided country when 11 states decided they wanted to secede over slavery. We fought a war over that. After the civil war, there were decades of violence committed against Black people to terrorize them from asserting full citizenship. During that time, the division was primarily based on skin color. Today, we are divided as a nation over whether women should be able to exercise reproductive choice. So when I see the claim that the country is divided over whether a notorious grifter and liar should be indicted for hiding payments to a porn star so he could deduct them from his taxes as a business expense, I have to ask why this is important. Other than as clickbait for MSM, that is. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/05/politics/donald-trump-court-2024/index.html

After years of being the All Things Trump network, Fox is ever so gradually slipping the Trump cult moorings. But how to deal with the fact that Trump is polling well among the GOP cult sheeple, while Ron DeSantis is self-immolating? No problem! The *Democrats* are persecuting Trump because they want him to be the GOP nominee! A triumph of re-branding--according to Fox, the Democratic party is the party of Trump 2024! Who knew? https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/fox-tests-new-conspiracy-theory-donald-trumps-indictment-trick-democrats-get

I had a Facebook discussion yesterday about statistics. At one point, my interlocutor posted "You should know better than anyone that statistics can be manipulated to actually show the opposite of what is real." Well, just to be clear, that's not a problem with statistics, that's a problem of motivated reasoning, which is not a statistical algorithm. The topic of our discussion was economics, and he says he trusts Krugman on economics. Krugman, of course, uses statistics to draw his conclusion. He's a Nobel Laureate, but the Nobel Prize in Economics is notoriously political. Here's a little lesson is substituting argument from authority for argument from evidence. Ronald A. Fisher is widely considered to be the founder of modern statistics. There's no question that our understanding of the world owes a significant debt to Fisher and his statistical innovations. But Fisher was quite vocal in questioning the association of smoking with cancer, which is based...

"In a climate in which Republican politicians and influencers must unanimously declare that Donald Trump is a victim of political persecution and an almost sainted political figure it’s just incredibly difficult to sustain any kind of argument that Trump should, in essence, be fired as the head of the Republican party. The opening to make that political argument is vanishingly small, open only for the most dexterous of political animals and maybe not even possible for them. "Something like this state of affairs may continue for the better part of the year, with Donald Trump dominating the race with no clear and credible challenger. Or we may see another candidate like Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin rocket forth like a GOP primary memestock harnessing the same latent Trump-skeptical votes that fueled Ron DeSantis’s rise in late 2022. But those boomlets are fueled by the hope that the chosen candidate might be able to unseat Trump rather than any particular attachment to the cand...

I stopped watching tee-vee over 20 years ago. I've seen no reason to regret that choice. Why is MTG treated with dignity on 60 minutes and not simply laughed out of the studio for the QAnon stooge that she is is? "Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) defended calling Democrats “a party of pedophiles” in a widely panned “60 Minutes” segment Sunday, seemingly claiming that politicians who support children receiving gender-affirming care meets the definition of pedophilia. "The MAGA-aligned conspiracy theory-enthusiast-turned congresswoman’s remarks came after CBS News’ Lesley Stahl asked Greene about her frequent “over-the-top” comments, including, specifically, saying that “Democrats are a party of pedophiles” in a 2022 interview. “I would definitely say so,” Greene responded during the “60 Minutes” interview. “They support grooming children.” “They are not pedophiles,” Stahl pushed back. “Why would you say that?” “Democrats support — even Joe Biden the president himself — s...

"The United States does not have much of a history of holding its high office-holders to account. No former president or vice president has been convicted of crimes committed while in office. "It is not true, however, as some commentators are now implying, that it is unprecedented for a former member of the executive to be arrested and tried. Thomas Jefferson’s first vice president, Aaron Burr, got into similar legal hot water. As the History Channel points out, “On February 19, 1807, Burr was arrested in Alabama for alleged treason and sent to Richmond, Virginia, to be tried in a U.S. circuit court.”" More here: https://www.juancole.com/2023/04/unprecedented-resident-president.html